Politics & Power Quote by Bjork

Bjork isn’t taking a cheap swipe at religion so much as quietly re-centering what “spiritual support” can look like in a modern, secular society. The line works because it refuses the usual drama of belief-versus-unbelief. Instead, it’s observational and almost matter-of-fact: when life cracks open - divorce, depression - the local reflex isn’t confession or a pew, it’s weather, rock, wind, distance. That specificity is the point. She’s not describing an abstract worldview; she’s describing a coping technology.

The subtext is cultural, not doctrinal. In much of America, faith communities double as mental health infrastructure, social network, and narrative machine: you get language for suffering, people who check on you, rituals that mark survival. Bjork implies that Iceland (and arguably a wider Nordic model) routes those needs through a different system: landscape as sanctuary, solitude as ritual, nature as witness. There’s an understated critique of how institutional religion can become a default emotional emergency room elsewhere - a place you’re expected to go when your personal story turns into a crisis.

It’s also a neat piece of Bjork branding that doesn’t feel like branding: the artist who has always treated the natural world as collaborator, not backdrop, locating her country’s psychology in its geology. The final “instead” lands like a shrug and a manifesto at once. It frames resilience as something you hike into, not something you pray into.